Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s got to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist—apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature. First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.

The cakes he’d brought to CarpFest had been made from fish caught in Louisiana. These had been frozen and shipped to Ho Chi Minh City. There, Parola related, the carp had been thawed, processed, vacuum-packed, refrozen, and put on another container ship, bound for New Orleans. In a concession to Americans’ anti-carp prejudice, he’d rechristened the fish “silverfin,” a term he’d had trademarked.

Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted: “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.

“For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” Aldo Leopold noted in an essay commemorating the passenger pigeon’s passing.

(The fake shelf was eventually destroyed by an earthquake fifteen hundred miles away, in Alaska; because the aquifer is so large, Devils Hole experiences what are known as seismic seiches—in effect, mini-tsunamis.)

Consider the “synanthrope.” This is an animal that has not been domesticated and yet, for whatever reason, turns out to be peculiarly well suited to life on a farm or in the big city. Synanthropes (from the Greek syn, for “together,” and anthropos, “man”) include raccoons, American crows, Norway rats, Asian carp, house mice, and a couple of dozen species of cockroach. Coyotes profit from human disturbance but skirt areas dense with human activity; they have been dubbed “misanthropic synanthropes.” In botany, “apophytes” are native plants that thrive when people move in; “anthropophytes” are plants that thrive when people move them around. Anthropophytes can be still further subdivided into “archaeophytes,” which were spread before Europeans arrived in the New World, and “kenophytes,” which were spread afterward.

Those that thrived—or at least survived—would be crossbred and their offspring thrown back into the tanks for more stress. The corals subject to this selective pressure would, it was hoped, undergo a kind of “assisted evolution.”

“Really what I am is a futurist,” she said at another point. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

So I see assisted evolution as filling that gap, being a bridge between now and the day when we’re really holding down climate change or, hopefully, reversing it.”

Wachenfeld told me that the new technologies would probably have to be deployed in tandem, so that, for example, a robot might deliver genetically enhanced larvae to a reef shaded by a thin film or man-made fog. “There’s all sorts of just amazingly imaginative innovation,” he said.

“We’re not talking about coral gardening here,” Hardisty told me. “We’re talking about major, industrial-scale—all-of-reef-scale—interventions. So it’s a really steep curve, but it’s possible—that’s what we’ve concluded—with the best minds in the world, all working together.” To aid in the research effort, the SeaSim was going to be expanded; if I came back in a few years, Hardisty said, it would be twice the size. “It won’t be a silver bullet,” he continued. “It’s going to be a combination of things, combinations of, for instance, cloud-brightening and assisted evolution. We’re going to need engineering, because we are looking at fast deployment to make a difference. And we’re also going to need to borrow technologies from Big Pharma, because we’ve got to figure out mass-delivery mechanisms. Maybe—I don’t know—we’ll use little pellets.”

Everyone I spoke to in Australia understood that preserving the Great Barrier Reef in all its greatness was beyond what could realistically—or unrealistically—be hoped for. Even settling for a tenth of it would mean shading and robotically seeding an area the size of Switzerland. What was at issue was, at best, a diminished thing—a kind of Okay Barrier Reef.

“If we can extend the life of the reef by twenty, thirty years, that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions, and it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef,” Hardisty told me. “I mean, it’s really sad that we have to talk like that. But that’s where we are now.”

“What people are not seeing is that this is already a genetically modified environment,” he went on. Invasive species alter the environment by adding entire genomes that don’t belong. Genetic engineers, by contrast, alter just a few bits of DNA here and there.

By the time they hit Middle Point, they’d sped up to thirty miles a year. When researchers measured the toads at the invasion front, they found out why. The toads on the front lines had significantly longer legs than the toads back in Queensland. And this trait was heritable.

Thomas explained that work on a gene-drive mouse was going slower than he’d hoped. Still, he thought by the end of the decade someone would develop one. It might be an X-shredder, or it might rely on a design that’s yet to be imagined. Mathematical modeling suggests that an effective suppression drive would be extremely efficient; a hundred gene-drive mice released on an island could take a population of fifty thousand ordinary mice down to zero within a few years. “So that’s quite striking,” Thomas said. “It’s something to aim for.”

(First you ship a species around the world, then you poison it from helicopters!)

As Tizard points out, we’re constantly moving genes around the world, usually in the form of entire genomes. This is how chestnut blight arrived in North America in the first place; it was carried in on Asian chestnut trees, imported from Japan. If we can correct for our earlier tragic mistake by shifting just one more gene around, don’t we owe it to the American chestnut to do so? The ability to “rewrite the very molecules of life” places us, it could be argued, under an obligation.